Ph.D. Dissertation
Healing China: Professionals and organizations in the psychotherapeutic field in China
Committee: Amy Hanser (Chair), Jennifer Berdahl, and Sean Lauer
While psychotherapy is one of the most powerful institutions in modern societies, investigation into the organizational basis of psychotherapy has been rare. Much less attention is paid to psychotherapeutic organizations and practice in non-Western contexts. Due to the unique historical and political context in which it is embedded, the commercial psychotherapeutic industry in China is not only rapidly expanding but also structured in systematically different ways from the West. Drawing on sociological theories of institutions and organizations, this study addresses the questions of (1) What are the organizational structures of commercial psychotherapeutic organizations in China? How do they reflect the institutional logics at work in the psychotherapeutic industry of China as a whole? (2) How do institutional and organizational structures constrain and enable the opportunities, preferences, and activities of individual psychotherapists? A combination of in-depth interviewing, participant observation, and shadowing will be used. By connecting inter-organizational relations, intra-organizational structures, and situated actions and interactions of psychotherapeutic workers, this study hopes to bring new perspectives into the sociology of psychotherapy and shed light on forces and factors that shape mental health care delivery.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Psychotherapeutic Services in China
Qin, R. S. 2026. Payment Conflicts and Professional Legitimacy in China’s Psychotherapy Market. (Under review at Economy & Society)
Abstract: Intimate service providers often have to palliate moral controversies about monetary payment through relational work, but less is known what underlies unsuccessful relational work. This article examines how psychotherapeutic professionals, laypeople, and therapeutic platforms in China contest the authority of an uninstitutionalized profession through negotiating payment-related practices for psychological counselling services. Using interviews and ethnography, I show that psychotherapeutic professionals draw on expert knowledge and professionalism in their relational work to justify control over pricing and payment processes. Laypeople resist professional justifications by deploying a “hostile worlds” framework that portrays money as a contaminant to the therapeutic relationship. Therapeutic platforms introduce new tactics of transactions that aim to offset money’s contaminating effect, undermining the autonomy of the professionals they work with. In showing how an emerging profession’s struggle for legitimacy is bound up with cultural contests about appropriate payment for intimate economic services, I contribute to both the sociology of professions and cultural economic sociology.
Qin, R.S. 2024. Confiding in strangers: trust and mental health service use in China. Social Theory & Health 22, 187–208. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41285-024-00211-8
Abstract: Research on trust has formed a dichotomous conceptualization of trust as established through either institutional support or relational norms, neglecting other possibilities. Drawing on Simmel’s theorization of the Stranger and Zelizer’s relational perspective, I argue that “stranger trust” is another mode of trust that frames the trusted person as a Simmelian stranger through interactional negotiations. Using interviews with mental health service consumers in China, I address the question: how do participants of therapeutic relationships form trust under the unfavorable institutional environments for mental health services in China? My findings show that participants in therapeutic relationships create trust by framing the service provider as a “Stranger.” This mode of trust-building consists of three components: (1) a moderate interpersonal social distance, (2) differentiation from other types of relations, usually through monetary payment, and (3) a depersonalized discourse of emotions. From the client’s perspective, the establishment of stranger trust mitigates the risk posed by a lack of institutional regulation for mental health service provision. This study calls attention to how relational practices create and maintain trust in settings with weak institutional support for trust.
Gender and Employment during COVID-19
Fuller, S., Cai, M., Doucet, A. and Qin, S.. 2026. Gender Divisions of Domestic Labour During the COVID‐19 Pandemic in Canada: Did Increases in Father Involvement Persist Through Later Stages?. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 63(1), p.e70018. https://doi.org/10.1111/cars.70018
Abstract: In the wake of widespread disruptions to employment, schooling and childcare early in the COVID-19 pandemic, fathers’ share of domestic labour increased. Drawing on Canadian survey data from August/September 2021, we investigate whether this was a harbinger of lasting change. We find that dual-earner parents of young children continued to report modest increases in father involvement in housework and childcare. However, first-wave household employment arrangements that initially boosted father involvement were not associated with sustained increases a year and a half later. Persistent change only occurred when such arrangements prevailed in later pandemic phases, that is, when fathers continued working from home while mothers returned to their workplace. Likewise, school/care closures, most widespread in the first wave, had no lasting impact on fathers’ share of childcare tasks or responsibilities. Our findings highlight the importance of longer timeframes and couple-level employment data to assess pandemic impacts on gender divisions of labour.
Qin, S., Cai, M., Fuller, S., & Qian, Y. 2022. Gender, Parenthood, and Employment During COVID-19: An Immigrant-Native Born Comparison in Canada. Canadian Ethnic Studies 54(3), 63-108. doi:10.1353/ces.2022.0025.
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has upended how we live and work. In Canada, the gender gap in employment among parents with young children widened substantially during the pandemic. Previous studies, however, examine parents in Canada without distinguishing them by immigrant status, although immigrant versus Canadian-born parents may have distinct work-family experiences. In this study, we investigate how the intersection of parental and immigrant statuses influenced change in gender employment gaps during the pandemic. Drawing on Labor Force Survey (LFS) microdata from March 2019 to February 2021, we examine the probability of employment by gender, parental status, and immigrant status. When comparing the school closure period (March to August 2020) relative to the same months in 2019 (pre-pandemic), immigrant women, irrespective of parental status, witnessed larger declines in employment than their male counterparts and non-immigrants, and the gender gap widened the most among recent immigrants with school-aged children. When schools gradually reopened (September 2020 to February 2021), employment recovered faster for recent than established immigrant mothers. Overall, our findings show that among parents of young children, the growing gender gap in employment during the pandemic was concentrated among immigrants, with immigrant mothers disproportionately disadvantaged. This study illuminates how the pandemic exacerbated intersectional inequalities based on gender, parenthood, and immigrant status.
We used STATA 16 to analyze the data. To obtain a copy of our code for replication purposes, please contact me directly.